On 23 November 2012 my partner and I checked into our flight from Sydney to Manila for the start of a 3 week holiday in the Philippines. As the flight was via Darwin we had to collect our bags and re-check in for the second leg of our journey. However my checked in luggage didn’t make it as far as Darwin let alone Manila. Jetstar eventually located my bag but were unable to reunite me with it for the duration of our holiday. We had already spent our only day in Manila shopping for emergency clothes and then extended our stay in Busuanga by an additional 2 days waiting for the bag to be forwarded onto me. The rest of our stay in the Philippines wasn’t in close proximity to an airport and we were informed that I could only be reunited with my bag if I collected it from an airport. Unfortunately we were nowhere near an airport for the remainder of the holiday so unable to collect it conveniently.
Jetstar didn’t keep in touch with me adequately regarding the status of my lost luggage, so we wasted half a day travelling unnecessarily to Busuanga airport to wait for a bag that never arrived and a lot of time, effort and money was spent on internet cafes and phone calls to try and find out what was going on.
The bag was eventually forwarded to the UK for my family to look after until my return home mid December.
I feel a strong sense of disappointment at the way my lost luggage was handled by the Baggage Services department. The emphasis was on me to call and follow up to try and establish where my bag was rather than the other way round. Whilst the Baggage Services staff would more often than not call me back when I emailed to request them to do so, the effort by them felt uncoordinated and unhelpful and lacked even a basic understanding or empathy with my plight, let alone any form of apology for the situation to which I found myself in.
Whilst I appreciate that there may be a time delay and effort on Jetstar’s part to search for lost luggage, communication with the passenger needs to be paramount. Even if the call is just to say that they are still searching! I felt quite helpless and annoyed by their apparently lack of interest.
After a lot of persistence I have today (3 Feb 2013) been given a postal address to send my receipts to for reimbursement:
Jetstar Airways Pty LTD. P.O. Box 635 VIC 3020, Australia or alternatively, you fax it on +61 (0)3 8660 2869. Or email Baggage.Services@jetstar.com
Having rung Jetstar wishing to make a formal complaint about the way my claim has been handled, I was told there was no address email or postal that I could contact them on. The only way of doing so was to use an online form for travel reimbursements and request a call back. This seems a rather ‘round the houses’ way of complaining in my view. Maybe Jetstar don't anticpate or want complaints about their service, but here goes ….